COAHL Successes

Consortial Licensing

Equalizing Access to Information Resources for all Ontario Medical StudentsA primary goal of COAHL when it first began to meet in 1994 was to ensure that all medical students in Ontario, regardless of where they were enrolled, would have access to core online information resources. In 1994, it was agreed that Medline was an essential resource and that each institution should support and provide electronic access to this database. With funding provided through AMS Inc., COAHL then put into place a system which allowed all members to share other important databases without mounting them separately. Cancerlit, Bioethics and Aidsline were mounted at Western, Queen's and Ottawa respectively and transparent access was provided to students at each of the other institutions. This equalized access at a fraction of what it would have cost each institution to mount the databases separately.

In the course of implementing a shared database system, favourable consortial pricing arrangements were negotiated with a major vendor of health science information. Vendor representatives have been invited to each of the COAHL meetings and issues having to do with performance, access and cost have been dealt with on a collective basis for the benefit of all of the five institutions since 1994.

COAHL has expanded its negotiations to include several hundred full text electronic journal packages and electronic books to further the goal of providing access to information wherever and whenever needed and to ensure the clinical sciences resources for both education and research are covered. Some examples include the British Medical journals, Cell, Clinical Evidence, and Lippincott Williams and Wilkins health sciences journals/books. Consortial pricing arrangements have resulted in lower overall costs for the five COAHL libraries and the availability of electronic core text collections.

Northern Academic Health Sciences Network

The Northern Academic Health Sciences Network was established to develop educational programmes for medical specialists and other health professionals in Northern Ontario. COAHL was contracted by NAHSN in 2000 to coordinate their Regional Library Service (RLS) Project, which focussed on conducting needs assessments, implementing services and resources, evaluating the outcome, and recommending a model for delivery of library services in Northern Ontario. COAHL coordinated the hiring of Joanne Muellenbach as the NAHSN Project Planner (Information Services) in February 2000 for a two year contract.

This two year pilot project started with four sites strategically located in the eastern and western sectors of Northern Ontario, and expanded to eleven sites in the Project Expansion Phase in August 2000. Health practitioners in the pilot sites benefited from a high quality core collection of online information resources, onsite training in searching databases and the Internet, and ongoing support of their information needs. The Project Planner worked with existing health library services in the North to ensure the coordination of available library services and resources.

In early 2002, NAHSN submitted a report to the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, North Region, entitled Regional Library Service Expansion: Retention Strategy for Northern Ontario Health Practitioners. The Ministry provided the ongoing funding needed to continue and expand the RLS to all health practitioners in Northern Ontario. Joanne Muellenbach was hired as the Director of the service, which has been renamed the Northern Ontario Virtual Library (NOVL) (for details see http://www.novl.ca). Additional staff was hired in 2002 and progress continues with this extremely successful initiative. COAHL's official involvement with the project ended with the submission of the final report to the Ministry. However, there continues to be a close collegial relationship between COAHL and NOVL, with the Director of NOVL providing updates on the service on a regular basis.

Community Outreach

All COAHL libraries receive many requests from non-affiliated users to access information and library services. As well, the medical schools rely on community physicians for instruction, effectively creating a model of distributed medical schools in each region of Ontario. These adjunct faculty members are entitled to information resources, and their students expect that information will be available to them in each teaching location. Access is important but even more essential is the teaching of the research skills to help the health care professionals to be both efficient and successful in retrieving needed information. At all COAHL sites the libraries are involved in teaching information literacy skills to specific groups in their communities. This can range from teaching free Internet resources such as PubMed to teaching Medline access from the university's commercial system. In the latter case, other resources available at the academic centres are also offered, such as document delivery and reference services. Normally these services would be offered in exchange for an annual fee, but AMS funding is used to subsidize the training and services.

Programs by institution

Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM), Lakehead University and Laurentian University

Ontario Learning Resources for Nursing (OLRN)

Since January 2002, COAHL has ensured that Ontario colleges and universities participating in the collaborative baccalaureate nursing program have access to the same key evidence-based electronic nursing resources.